Chapter 7: Asking People About Themselves

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Chapter 7Asking People About Themselves
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What is a Survey?

• Survey methodology
• Nonexperimental
• - Questionnaires
• - Interviews

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Why Conduct Surveys?

• Why are surveys used?
• Allows people to tell researchers about
  themselves
• A method for studying relationships among
  variables and ways that attitudes and behaviors
  change over time
• Provides useful information for making public
  policy decisions
• An important complement to experimental findings

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Why Conduct Surveys? (cont)

• Some important issues
• Assume people are willing and able to provide
  truthful and accurate answers
• - Response settendency to respond along a given
  theme
• Social desirability response set would be someone
  responding to look good
• When are respondents most likely to lie?
• - When they dont trust the researcher(s)

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Constructing Questions to Ask

• First define the research objectives!
• Can use 3 general types of content questions
• Attitudes and beliefs
• Facts and demographics
• Behaviors

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Constructing Questions to Ask (cont)

• Question wording
• Potential problems caused by a difficulty
  understanding the question
• Unfamiliar technical terms
• Vague or imprecise terms
• Ungrammatical sentence structure
• Phrasing that overloads working memory
• Embedding the question with misleading
  information

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Constructing Questions to Ask (cont)

• Important considerations when writing questions
  
• Keep wording simple!
• Avoid double-barreled questions (they have 2
  points in them)
• Avoid loaded questions (has biased wording)
• Avoid grammatical negatives in wording
• Avoid yea-saying and nay-saving (these are
  questions that all ask a similar theme possibly
  leading to a response set)

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Responses to Questions

• Closed-ended questions
• Limited number of response alternatives are given
• More structured approach
• Easier to code
• Response alternatives are the same for everyone
• Useful when the dimensions of the variable are
  well defined

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Responses to Questions (cont)

• Open-ended questions
• Respondents free to answer any way they like
• Requires time to code responses costly
• Some responses cannot be categorized
• Are useful to find out what people are thinking
  and how people naturally view the world

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Responses to Questions (cont)

• Closed-ended and open-ended approaches can
• sometimes lead to different conclusions
  (Schwartz,
• 1999). Why?
• probably because the question wording leads
  the respondent

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Responses to Questions (cont)

• Points to consider when asking closed-ended
  questions (see next series of slides)
• Number of response alternatives
• Rating scales
• Labeling response alternatives

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Responses to Questions (cont)

• Formats of rating scales
• Simplest and most direct scale is five to seven
  response alternatives with the end-points on the
  scale labeled to define the extremes.

Strongly agree _____ _____ _____ _____ _____
Strongly disagree
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Responses to Questions (cont)

• Graphic rating scale
• Requires a mark along a continuous 100-
  millimeter line that is anchored with
  descriptions at each end

A ruler is used to measure the score on a scale
that ranges from 0 to 100.
Not very enjoyable
Very enjoyable
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Responses to Questions (cont)

• Semantic differential scale
• Measures the meaning of concepts
• Respondents rate any concept on a series of
  bipolar adjectives using 7-point scales

Good _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____
_____ Bad Strong _____ _____ _____ _____
_____ _____ _____ Weak
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Responses to Questions (cont)

• Nonverbal scale for children
• Children may not understand other types of scales

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Responses to Questions (cont)

• Labeling response alternatives
• Sometimes needed to clearly define the meaning of
  each alternative

__________ __________ __________ __________
__________ Strongly Agree
Undecided Disagree
Strongly Agree

Disagree
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Finalizing the Questionnaire

• Formatting the questionnaire
• Attractive and professional looking!
• No spelling errors and neatly typed!
• Questions and response alternatives should be
  easy to identify
• Dont change from 5- to 4- to 7-point scales
• Ask most interesting and important questions
  first
• Ask demographic questions last

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Finalizing the Questionnaire (cont)

• Refine the questions
• Before administering the survey, pilot test the
  questions to a small group of people

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Administering Surveys

• Two methods to administer surveys
• Written questionnaire (not live)
• Interview (live)

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Administering Surveys (cont)

• Positive features of written questionnaires
• Less costly than interviews
• Allows respondents to be completely anonymous
• Can be administered in person to groups or
  individuals
• Can be administered through the mail, on the
  Internet, or with other technologies

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Administering Surveys (cont)

• Potential negative features of questionnaires
• Respondent may not understand the questions
• Motivation of respondent
• Response rates usually low (esp. mail surveys)
• People may misrepresent themselves (Internet
  surveys)
• Unanswered questions left on survey

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Administering Surveys (cont)

• Positive features of interviews
• Involves an interaction between people
• - Response rates higher than questionnaires
• People answer most, if not all, the questions
• Interviewer can clarify questions
• Interviewer can ask follow-up questions

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Administering Surveys (cont)

• Potential negative feature of interviews
• Interviewer bias
• Show approval or disapproval of certain answers?
• If there are several interviewers, each could
  possess different characteristics (e.g.,
  attractiveness, age, ethnicity, etc.)
• Expectations could lead interviewers to see what
  they are looking for in the answers

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Administering Surveys (cont)

• Three methods of conducting interviews
• Face-to-face interviews
• 2. Telephone interviews
• 3. Focus group interviews

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Sampling From Populations

• Sampling
• Population is composed of all individuals of
  interest to the researcher
• A sample is a subgroup of the population

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Sampling From Populations (cont)

• With proper sampling, we can use sample
  information to precisely estimate characteristics
  of the population (aka statistical inference)
• - Sampling error (margin of error)?

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Sampling Techniques

• Two basic techniques for sampling
• Probability sampling
• - Each member of the population has a
  specifiable probability of being chosen
• Nonprobability sampling
• - Unknown probability of any member being chosen

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Sampling Techniques (cont)

• Probability sampling
• Simple random sampling equal probability
• Stratified random sampling divided into
  subgroups (strata) and random samples are taken
  from each strata
• Cluster sampling identify clusters and sample
  from these clusters

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Sampling Techniques (cont)

• Nonprobability sampling
• Haphazard sampling convenience sampling

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The End